EARTH LIFE
Is a multi-year transdisciplinary series examining our relationships to our built environments and social infrastructures.
Coming 2025.
The artistic aspect of the project lies in this unclassifiable excessive register to reimagine relations between people and other-than-humans within our city and the world at large and our built environments and social infrastructures—producing spatialized inequities. Integrating critical spatial practice with Indigenous ecological knowledge and collaboration, the project posits that confronting these systemic failures requires a radical reorientation toward kin-centric design: frameworks that recenter humanity’s evolutionary interdependence with non-human life and ancestral land-based praxis.
The project interrogates how architecture, agricultural systems, and climate policy perpetuate violence by severing communities from their capacity to live as ecosystems—a rupture epitomized by food apartheid in NYCHA housing to Pine Ridge. As climate collapse accelerates, the project argues that surviving anthropogenic crisis demands an ontological shift: from human exceptionalism to recognizing design as a negotiation with life itself. This necessitates dismantling extractive architectures while cultivating infrastructures modeled on Indigenous principles of care. By situating migration, food sovereingty, and abolition within this lens, EARTH LIFE reframes adaptation as a process of re-membering: healing humanity’s severed kinship with land, water, and more-than-human beings to generate lifeways capable of weathering collapse.
Through community-engaged participatory research, Indigenous collaboration and the development of a counter-archive documenting land-based resistance. Its aim is to produce a critical praxis that bridges academic and Indigenous knowledge systems—not to universalize, but to amplify place-specific strategies for designing with life, rather than against it.
Is a multi-year transdisciplinary series examining our relationships to our built environments and social infrastructures.
Coming 2025.
The artistic aspect of the project lies in this unclassifiable excessive register to reimagine relations between people and other-than-humans within our city and the world at large and our built environments and social infrastructures—producing spatialized inequities. Integrating critical spatial practice with Indigenous ecological knowledge and collaboration, the project posits that confronting these systemic failures requires a radical reorientation toward kin-centric design: frameworks that recenter humanity’s evolutionary interdependence with non-human life and ancestral land-based praxis.
The project interrogates how architecture, agricultural systems, and climate policy perpetuate violence by severing communities from their capacity to live as ecosystems—a rupture epitomized by food apartheid in NYCHA housing to Pine Ridge. As climate collapse accelerates, the project argues that surviving anthropogenic crisis demands an ontological shift: from human exceptionalism to recognizing design as a negotiation with life itself. This necessitates dismantling extractive architectures while cultivating infrastructures modeled on Indigenous principles of care. By situating migration, food sovereingty, and abolition within this lens, EARTH LIFE reframes adaptation as a process of re-membering: healing humanity’s severed kinship with land, water, and more-than-human beings to generate lifeways capable of weathering collapse.
Through community-engaged participatory research, Indigenous collaboration and the development of a counter-archive documenting land-based resistance. Its aim is to produce a critical praxis that bridges academic and Indigenous knowledge systems—not to universalize, but to amplify place-specific strategies for designing with life, rather than against it.
Copyright © 2025 Zacarías González. All Rights Reserved.